IBM FlashSystem vs Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) comparison

IBM and Nutanix are both solutions in the All-Flash Storage category. IBM is ranked #13 with an average rating of 8.5, while Nutanix is ranked #6 with an average rating of 9.0. IBM holds a 6.7% mindshare in AFS, compared to Nutanix’s 0.5% mindshare. Additionally, 91% of IBM users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 98% of Nutanix users who would recommend it.

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Sep 18, 2024

IBM FlashSystem and Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) are leading contenders in the enterprise storage market. IBM FlashSystem is rated higher for features and pricing, while Nutanix Unified Storage stands out in deployment and customer service.

Features: IBM FlashSystem users value its high performance, data reduction capabilities, and integration ease. Nutanix Unified Storage users appreciate its scalability, consolidated management, and versatile workload support.

Room for Improvement: IBM FlashSystem users suggest enhancing its replication capabilities, simplifying licensing, and improving analytics. Nutanix Unified Storage users recommend better analytics, reducing node size, and enhancing hardware optimization.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: IBM FlashSystem is praised for its smooth deployment process but requires consistent support. Nutanix Unified Storage is noted for its straightforward setup and excellent customer service.

Pricing and ROI: IBM FlashSystem users feel it provides strong ROI due to its competitive pricing and performance. Nutanix Unified Storage users recognize good ROI but indicate higher upfront costs.

To learn more, read our detailed IBM FlashSystem vs. Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) Report (Updated: April 2025).

Buyer's Guide

IBM FlashSystem vs. Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS)

April 2025

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Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Categories and Ranking

Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the All-Flash Storage category, the mindshare of Pure FlashArray X NVMe is 0.8%, down from 0.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IBM FlashSystem is 6.7%, down from 6.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) is 0.5%, up from 0.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

All-Flash Storage

Featured Reviews

Eugene Hemphill

Sales Manager at Multicomputos PR

Helps to save money and resources with the data compression feature

One point I'd like to improve is that the tool should start selling small boxes again. It discontinued some products and is focusing on bigger, more capable boxes, neglecting the SMB market. Even though it's not a big market, it shouldn't have removed them. One way to improve the product is to add an operational assistant that doesn't depend on VMware. It could also establish more alliances with other operational systems.

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Raanan Sitton

Vice President Sales at BELOCAL LTD

Offers cost-effective storage for small companies with budget constraints

IBM FlashSystem 5300 is offered at a very low cost in Israel, which is advantageous for small companies. However, other features like deduplication and compression do not perform effectively. The price sensitivity makes it a viable option for clients with budgetary constraints, as it allows us to secure deals based on the cost rather than advanced performance.

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Juan-Contreras

System Administrator at a educational organization with 501-1,000 employees

Ensures streamlined management, simplified infrastructure, and efficient data handling

It has effectively managed our unstructured data, including audio and video files. We've experienced smooth operations without any complaints regarding uploading or downloading videos. While video usage isn't as frequent, we primarily utilize it for downloading videos related to specific incidents for administrators or our police department. We've encountered no issues uploading files of any kind. Transitioning from VMware to Nutanix has highlighted the overall flexibility of Nutanix's platform. Unlike VMware's three-tier system, Nutanix simplifies the learning curve by streamlining operations. The update process, in particular, has been favorable, with no critical issues encountered. The resiliency of Nutanix hasn't been thoroughly tested in our environment so far. However, I routinely check fault tolerance settings to ensure they meet our requirements. During the update process, I've observed critical errors occur as hosts restart, but Nutanix's self-healing mechanism handles these issues seamlessly. The benefit of using Nutanix is evident in several ways. Firstly, we've effectively compressed our storage while significantly expanding our overall storage pool. Previously, our service had a capacity of twenty-five terabytes, but with Nutanix, we've scaled up to a hundred and twenty terabytes physically and approximately fifty terabytes logically. This expansion has been accompanied by noticeable improvements in performance, particularly with reduced latency and IOPS well within the boundaries of our equipment. All our resources are centralized in a single location for managing and running storage: our data center. We operate three Nutanix nodes within this center, effectively managing everything from one central location. We don't have any other locations outside of our data center running a Nutanix cluster. Nutanix's capability to eliminate silos within our organization's storage infrastructure was discussed during our recent call with the engineer. Although we haven't explored this feature extensively yet, there's a forthcoming project where we anticipate leveraging it.One thing I'd appreciate is having a desktop application similar to what VMware offered. With VMware, I could download a separate client program onto my computer, allowing me to log in directly rather than accessing the host through a browser.

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Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Pros

"The standout features for us in Pure FlashArray X NVMe are its robust DDoS protection, seamless transparent failover, and failback capabilities ensuring high availability."

"Pure FlashArray X NVMe has low latency and high Ops. It is an evergreen model."

"It's incredibly easy to use and greatly simplified our ability to both deploy and manage our storage subsystems."

"The Pure1 component is most valuable at this point in time when comparing it with EMC. Pure1 is where you can have your diagnostics in the cloud, so you can look at things from your mobile phone."

"Pure FlashArray X NVMe helps to improve our processing speed. It is user-friendly and easy to use."

"The tool's valuable features are speed, security, data compression, and reliability. Its data compression feature is the best that we have ever seen. It helps us to save money and resources."

"Pure Storage has signature security technology, which cannot be deleted, even if you are an administrator."

"FlashArray has some fresh efficiency features. I've never seen a storage solution with a compression rating this high before. It's at least 4-to-1 on Oracle databases. It's the best flash storage for Oracle."

More Pure FlashArray X NVMe pros

"The most valuable feature in demand is virtualization and its support storage of virtualization features."

"IBM FlashSystem has an easy to use GUI, similar to the IBM Storewize family, which make it one of the best flash storage systems in the market."

"IBM products at the enterprise level are stable solutions, with a score of nine out of ten for stability."

"The storage system is one of the best in the world."

"The Flash core models offer amazing performance."

"The most valuable features are flexibility and performance."

"Over the years, it has become increasingly user-friendly."

"IBM FlashSystem is a flexible solution with plenty of features."

More IBM FlashSystem pros

"The interface is quite simple. It is very good. It is easy to configure. It also has a powerful CLI."

"They have well-documented best practices and the interface is good."

"We have virtually zero downtime with Nutanix. It updates itself, and we can easily move machines from one cluster to another."

"From an analytics perspective, the best aspect of Unified Storage is its locality. When you read data, you want to know that you're only reading data from the particular local storage node. It's also critical to access the data as quickly as possible from that. From a business perspective, the most important thing is ease of use. Having a combination of compute and storage makes it much easier to manage."

"The most valuable features of Nutanix Unified Storage are the unified dashboard and the ease of administration."

"Nutanix Unified Storage is easy to use. New employees are able to come up to speed fairly quickly with regard to the day-to-day administration processes."

"Unified Storage's centralized management features enable us to accomplish whatever we want in terms of operations and migrations."

"Nutanix has excellent product documentation available on their portals, written in simple, easy-to-understand language."

More Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) pros

Cons

"I would like to see replication and DR features in the next release of this solution."

"There are some challenges with data encryption and reduction."

"In the future, I would like to see integration with enterprise backup systems."

"The UI for this solution needs to be improved."

"The software layer has to improve."

"The tool's portfolio is minimal. It is expensive."

"We have run into a couple of instances recently where we are running out of space. So we have had to buy some more packs for it and they have deployed fine and it has increased smoothly."

"Adding some functions to the product would be beneficial."

More Pure FlashArray X NVMe cons

"The installation is not easy. You need to have extensive knowledge to handle it."

"The support could improve by allowing you to speak to someone when you call rather than them calling you back. However, once we do have contact with one of their technicians they are excellent."

"This solution needs a management console where we are alerted to issues and can report them, or escalate them through email or another method."

"The GUI needs some improvement."

"The customer's expectations are what they get on the cloud, they're expecting even in the on-premises deployments, going forward."

"Include an option to upload the support package to the IBM ECuRep when opening an IBM PMR."

"The basic setup can be challenging when it comes to certain IP addresses and the configuration of the IP. You have to go in to different menus to makes changes and ensure it is stable."

"In IBM FlashSystem, data reduction is an area with shortcomings where improvements can be made in the future."

More IBM FlashSystem cons

"Security is an area for improvement. When there are vulnerabilities, there needs to be a faster approval process. The solution needs to automatically target the vulnerabilities and not waste too much time."

"With all of the Nutanix equipment, the licensing is expensive. We operate in the enterprise space, but we're a midsized company. At times, the price tag is a little bit shocking for a company with only 35 employees."

"The solution's monitoring and security features could be improved."

"The dashboard could be more customizable"

"Nutanix should improve the one-click upgrade. There are a lot of dependencies on third-party licenses and HP hardware we use internally. The one-click upgrade fails sometimes."

"There should be more information. If it gets used more by more people, they will have a bigger community to share ideas. It is still kind of newer. It is not as big as Dell and other companies."

"Lowering the price would improve this product."

"The GUI is not user-friendly for new users and has room for improvement."

More Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"They can tout the functionality and cutting edge technology that they have, but that's where the price tag comes in. The cost is high, but I think as they grow their business and get more customers that it will probably go down a little bit."

"Pretty much everything that you need is licensed when you buy the product. Licensing to me is different than the maintenance cost, but they can bleed into one another. We buy the product, and we expect three years of support bundled into what we negotiate on our storage arrays. I would start to see maintenance costs going into the fourth year, but we're not there yet."

"The support cost per array is about $20,000 a year for 24/7 support."

"Our licensing fees are $500,000+ USD."

"Given its price, Pure is not the first option."

"With Pure Storage, we would like to continue seeing price reductions with flash storage. I don't think we're any different than anybody else when we continue to look to the industry for price reductions of both NVMe and traditional SSD storage. We would like to see these prices continue to decline and erode, even displacing large spinning disks."

"We pay approximately $50,000 USD per year in licensing fees."

"The product is expensive."

More Pure FlashArray X NVMe pricing and cost advice

"They've been much more aggressive in the last five, six years than they were before that."

"I would rate the pricing of this solution a four out of five."

"Among IBM, Dell EMC, and Pure Storage, IBM is the cheapest. The price is also based on our location, the size of our entity, and our regular annual purchases from them. We are a very big IBM customer, so we normally get very high discounts. We are not a big customer of Pure Storage. We don't buy that much from Pure Storage per year. Everything is included in the price. There is no extra license for different functions."

"The price of IBM FlashSystem is reasonable."

"We have no issues with the price as it is very competitive."

"I find the pricing of the solution to be very reasonable."

"My customers got the IBM FlashSystem bundle offer. It was a one-time purchase for three years of service. The price would depend on the storage size and could reach between $25,000 to $55,000."

"Regarding licensing make sure you add at least three years software maintenance from IBM at the beginning, because you will not be able to download firmware updates or any fixes/patches without this."

More IBM FlashSystem pricing and cost advice

"It is quite expensive otherwise as it comes with three-tier peer underlying hardware."

"Nutanix Unified Storage was cheaper than other solutions we evaluated."

"The licensing model the tool has is cheaper than an HCI storage solution."

"Its pricing is good to okay. It is not super inexpensive, but it is still competitive. Everything could always be lower."

"I hope that it will stay the way it is. We have seen the changes in VMware and what happened to them. I have heard that Nutanix will raise the prices, but I hope that they will not do that."

"We are Nutanix partners, so it is pretty good. With the free terabyte that comes with the Nutanix clusters, we have started to build proposals for the clients. The price adjustment with the new policy of Nutanix Unified Storages seems attractive. Let us see if it has results."

"The cost of Nutanix Unified Storage can be prohibitive for some small and medium-sized businesses, making it challenging for them to adopt the product."

"The solution’s pricing could be cheaper."

More Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

15%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Manufacturing Company

11%

Government

Computer Software Company

14%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Government

Computer Software Company

32%

Educational Organization

21%

Manufacturing Company

Financial Services Firm

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Pure FlashArray X NVMe?

Pure FlashArray X NVMe helps to improve our processing speed. It is user-friendly and easy to use.

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Pure FlashArray X NVMe?

I am an engineer and am not aware of the setup cost.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Pure FlashArray X NVMe?

Adding some functions to the product would be beneficial. Storage replication should be essential, and the analytics ...

See all answers

What do you like most about IBM FlashSystem?

It is simple to make an update.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for IBM FlashSystem?

Many factors affect purchasing directly from IBM, often involving a multi-step process. Customers, especially in bank...

See all answers

What needs improvement with IBM FlashSystem?

The GUI needs some improvement. An additional function that could be helpful is reducing the time it takes to delete ...

See all answers

What do you like most about Nutanix Unified Storage?

Nutanix has excellent product documentation available on their portals, written in simple, easy-to-understand language.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Nutanix Unified Storage?

Nutanix Unified Storage isn't expensive.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Nutanix Unified Storage?

The dashboard could be more customizable

See all answers

Comparisons

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Compared 32% of the time

TrueNAS R-Series vs Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Compared 17% of the time

Pure Storage FlashBlade vs Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Compared 14% of the time

Dell Unity XT vs Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Compared 7% of the time

HPE Alletra Storage vs Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Compared 7% of the time

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Dell PowerStore vs IBM FlashSystem

Compared 23% of the time

Huawei OceanStor Dorado vs IBM FlashSystem

Compared 8% of the time

Pure Storage FlashArray vs IBM FlashSystem

Compared 8% of the time

HPE Alletra Storage vs IBM FlashSystem

Compared 8% of the time

Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform vs IBM FlashSystem

Compared 6% of the time

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Red Hat Ceph Storage vs Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS)

Compared 19% of the time

Dell PowerScale (Isilon) vs Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS)

Compared 18% of the time

MinIO vs Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS)

Compared 10% of the time

Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct vs Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS)

Compared 8% of the time

Qumulo vs Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS)

Compared 5% of the time

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Pure FlashArray X NVMe

March 2025

Download Pure FlashArray X NVMe product report

Buyer's Guide

IBM FlashSystem

April 2025

Download IBM FlashSystem product report

Buyer's Guide

Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS)

March 2025

Download Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) product report

Also Known As

Pure FlashArray//X NVMe, Pure FlashArray//X, FlashArray//X

IBM Storwize

Nutanix Files Storage, Nutanix Volumes Block Storage, Nutanix Objects Storage

Overview

Pure Storage FlashArray//X is the world’s first enterprise-class, all-NVMe flash storage array. It represents a new class of storage – shared accelerated storage, which is a term coined by Gartner – that delivers major breakthroughs in performance, simplicity, and consolidation.

Pure Storage

IBM FlashSystem products are enterprise computer data storage systems that store data on flash memory chips. Unlike storage systems that use standard solid-state drives, IBM FlashSystem products incorporate custom hardware based on technology from the 2012 acquisition of Texas Memory Systems. This hardware provides performance, reliability, and efficiency benefits versus competitive offerings.

IBM

Nutanix Unified Storage provides high availability and seamless cloud platform integration, ensuring robust redundancy, scalability, and streamlined management. It supports hybrid cloud connectivity, enhancing storage security and performance.

Nutanix Unified Storage is designed for effective data protection across block, file, and object storage, offering features like ransomware detection and a centralized management interface through Prism Central. Users gain improved SLAs and IT cost savings through its efficient performance. Despite its user-friendly interface, there is a demand for enhanced security measures such as Multi-Factor Authentication and DLP. While its resilience is notable, users seek improvements in protocol compatibility, storage capabilities, pricing, and support processes.

What are the most important features of Nutanix Unified Storage?

User-Friendly Interface: Simplifies storage management and monitoring.
High Availability: Ensures continuous operation and reliability.
Seamless Cloud Integration: Compatible with platforms like Azure and AWS.
Robust Redundancy: Protects data against hardware failures.
Scalable Architecture: Easily adapts to growing data storage needs.
Ransomware Detection: Enhances data protection measures.

What benefits and ROI might users find in reviews?

Improved SLAs: Increased service reliability and performance.
IT Cost Savings: Reduces expenses through efficient resource use.
Enhanced Security: Stronger data protection and reduced risk.
Centralized Management: Easier control and monitoring from one dashboard.

Industries implement Nutanix Unified Storage for tasks such as file storage, database performance improvement, and storage solution consolidation. Companies deploying virtual machines, securing against ransomware, connecting hybrid clouds, and backing up data find it useful. It supports workloads like Citrix VDI, Kubernetes, and research data, assisting many organizations migrating from legacy storage for better cost efficiency and reduced data center footprints.

Nutanix

Sample Customers

Fremont Bank, Judson ISD, The Nielsen Company

Celero, Friedhelm Loh Group, Clarks, Mingkang Natregro Health Food Group, Sofia, Etisalat Fights Fraud, UF Health Shands Hospital, Generali, Elecon Engineering Company Limited, Ventiv , Technology, CPFL Energia, Royal Caribbean Cruises Ltd., SciQuest, Coca-Cola Bottling Co. Consolidated, Paddy Power, Kelsey-Seybold Clinic, Interconnect Services, Severstal IP-Only AB, PVU Group GmbH

JetBlue, International Speedway Corporation, Volkswagen SAIC, Brighton and Hove City Council, Foresters Financial, Janus International Group, Cloud Comrade, Serco

Buyer's Guide

IBM FlashSystem vs. Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS)

April 2025

Free Report: IBM FlashSystem vs. Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS)

Find out what your peers are saying about IBM FlashSystem vs. Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.

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